Bicriteria network design problems

Abstract

The authors study a general class of bicriteria network design problems. A generic problem in this class is as follows: Given an undirected graph and two minimization objectives (under different cost functions), with a budget specified on the first, find a subgraph from a given subgraph class that minimizes the second objective subject to the budget on the first. They consider three different criteria -- the total edge cost, the diameter and the maximum degree of the network. Here, they present the first polynomial-time approximation algorithms for a large class of bicriteria network design problems for the above mentioned criteria. The following general types of results are presented. First, they develop a framework for bicriteria problems and their approximations. Second, when the two criteria are the same they present a black box parametric search technique. This black box takes in as input an (approximation) algorithm for the criterion situation and generates an approximation algorithm for the bicriteria case with only a constant factor loss in the performance guarantee. Third, when the two criteria are the diameter and the total edge costs they use a cluster based approach to devise approximation algorithms. The solutions violate both the criteria by a logarithmic factor. Finally, for the class of treewidth-bounded graphs, they provide pseudopolynomial-time algorithms for a number of bicriteria problems using dynamic programming. The authors show how these pseudopolynomial-time algorithms can be converted to fully polynomial-time approximation schemes using a scaling technique.